Step 16: Conclusion

Step 8: The claw

Well, the left hand looks cool now, what about the right hand? Yes, it would be nice to keep it mobile, but still it needs some kind of decoration. I was thinking about this from the very beginning of the project and after rejecting a few ideas decided to use a glove with a few lighted elements embedded. The donor glove was obtained from Lowes and basically the only criteria for it was lowest possible price (around $6).

On the top of the glove I put a large bottlecap, drilled 6 holes in it and inserted pieces of transparent tubing. In the cap I mounted two fast flashing RGB LEDs, one pointing toward 5 finger tubes and one pointing toward a thicker tube carrying the wires and disappearing under the arm segment of armor.

It’s interesting to note that if you wire bunch of flashing (“rainbow” is another term for these two-prone RGB LEDs that change their color automatically) LEDs in parallel and turn them on they will start flashing with the same color pattern. However just a few seconds later their timing starts drifting and they generate patterns that looks totally different.

Anyway, the tubing was sticking in different directions and was not flexible enough to just glue it to the glove. Also tubing glued to the glove just won’t let you bend the fingers. To address these problems I use aluminum flashing to create a set of rings that being glued to the tubing kept it in place, while keeping the glove flexible.

When I shut the room lights and turned on the glove lights the result appeared to look much better than I expected. Unfortunately it was hard to capture on camera because LEDs were too bright and didn’t allow to capture the light going thru the tubing. So I put aluminum foil under the cap and around the place where the thick tubing enters the cap to screen the brightest parts. That worked great and I was able to capture the result on camera with both the cap and the tubing bright enough to be recorded.

This is seriously epic. I am taking notes (literally). I especially love the way you use the plastic tubing to direct the LED light. <br><br>Question: what is your hand wearing inside the main left arm weapon? Do you have a glove on?

joyeuse13, <br><br>Thank you for you comment.<br><br>There is actually no glove inside the weapon block. There are 4 buttons mounted on the handle, one under each finger and pushing them in gloves is very difficult. The weapon block if covered with a piece of sanded plastic from the front side, so you can't actually see the hand inside.<br><br>Regards,<br>Andrey